The Judy Garland Christmas Movie ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ Was Surprisingly Spicy Behind the Scenes

It doesn’t get much more wholesome than Meet Me in St. Louis, even for a Christmas movie. While modern holiday fare leaves room for such delightful seasonal vices as torturing home invaders and screwing Jude Law, the Smith family are never less than 90% covered in brocade, their biggest problems are tailoring mishaps and potential relocation, and oldest daughter Rose scolds her younger sister, Judy Garland’s Esther, for even thinking about letting a boy kiss her before they’re engaged. Those two are down bad in a serious way, and the younger Smiths are shockingly depraved, but it never gets more scandalous than that. Thankfully, the same can’t be said for the set of the movie.

For one thing, the actress who played Rose, Lucille Bremer, was in no position to lecture anybody about sexual politics. Having failed for years to leverage a career dancing with the Rockettes into Hollywood stardom, it’s generally agreed that the only reason she got the role — a big one for her first full-length film, almost the same size as a heavyweight like Garland’s — was because she was hooking up with producer Arthur Freed. Garland made no secret of her disapproval, either, comparing her scenes with Bremer to “act to a stone wall.” Not that Garland didn’t brew her own workplace tea. Her character’s thirst for Tom Drake’s carried over into real life, and she pursued him with laser-like intensity that died abruptly once she got him into bed, an episode that ended in “dismay” for Garland and "embarrassment" for Drake. “Drake was an all-American boy, all right, but an all-American boy who liked other all-American boys,” as Garland biographer Gerald Clarke bitchily put it.

The real hot topic of the production, however, was the relationship between Garland and director Vincente Minelli. If you’ve heard the name Liza Minelli, you know how that turned out, but initially, they were at each other’s throats, and not in a sexy way. Minelli was unhappy with Garland’s performance in a way that he couldn’t seem to articulate, driving her to privately panic that she’d lost her talent and publicly “entertain the crew with malicious imitations of his maddening but sometimes comical indecision.” That all changed when Garland saw the dailies and realized how good he was making her look, which was apparently all you needed to do to get into her pants back then (it must be said, at this point, that she was on all the drugs, all the time). As the couple were caught getting down on at least one later movie set, there’s every likelihood they sent at least one of those impeccable antiques to the cleaners. Unfortunately, the spark didn’t last more than a few years, as Minelli was also very obviously at the far right of the Kinsey scale. Let it never be said that gay men didn’t love Judy Garland.